Dizzy blonde moment of the day two days ago was a classic: I decided to wash the car. It’s pollen season. The car wash was long over due. So, I got home from work, dropped my things off and went back to wash it. In high heels, naturally (who can be bothered to change shoes anyway??). I was using my landlord’s hose as it was conveniently placed in the driveway. It’s an old-fashioned kind with a metal handle. Of course I pressed the handle and sprayed my face instead of the car. When I say I’m a comedy show, it’s not a joke….but it’s only funny if you like daft blonde jokes…

You have to laugh at yourself and your life if you want to have a fun ride, but some things are serious. If you don’t deal with them you will always be a tad uncomfortable under the laughter…or under the chocolate cake, or the beautiful scenery, or the amazing sex, or the workload…. Yet even when you do the “heavy stuff” you have to do it with lightness, with laughter. As my former principal said: “whatever it is in your mind, it’s just a thought. It isn’t real.” Anyway, below someone explains something I find very important to do, so that you clear your mind and can fully enjoy your own jokes…ahem…

Austerity means to eliminate the comforts and cushions in your life that you have learned to snuggle into and lose wakefulness. Take away anything that dulls your edge. No newspapers or magazines. No TV. No candy, cookies, or sweets. No sex. No cuddling. No reading of anything at all while you eat or sit on the toilet. Reduce working time to a necessary minimum. No movies. No conversation that isn’t about truth, love, or the divine.

If you take on these disciplines for a few weeks, as well as any other disciplines that may particularly cut through your unique habits of dullness, then your life will be stripped of routine distraction. All that will be left is the edge you have been avoiding by means of your daily routine. You will have to face the basic discomfort and dissatisfaction that is the hidden texture of your life. You will be alive with the challenge of living your truth, rather than hiding from it.

Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of masculine growth. Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source. By putting all your attention into work, TV, sex, and reading, your suffering remains unpenetrated, and the source remains hidden. Your life becomes structured entirely by your favorite means of sidestepping the suffering you rarely allow yourself to feel. And when you do touch the surface of your suffering, perhaps in the form of boredom, you quickly pick up a magazine or the remote control.

Instead, feel your suffering, rest with it, embrace it, make love with it. Feel your suffering so deeply and thoroughly that you penetrate it, and realize its fearful foundation. Almost everything you do, you do because you are afraid to die. And yet dying is exactly what you are doing, from the moment you are born. Two hours of absorption in a good Super Bowl telecast may distract you temporarily, but the fact remains. You were born as a sacrifice. And you can either participate in the sacrifice, dissolving in the giving of your gift, or you can resist it, which is your suffering.

By eliminating the safety net of comforts in your life, you have the opportunity to free fall in this moment between birth and death, right through the hole of your fear, into the unthreatenable openness which is the source of your gifts. The superior man lives as this spontaneous sacrifice of love.

— David Deida (The Way Of The Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Woman, Work, and Sexual Desire)